Mark Alleyne: A captain and coach ahead of his time

NICK FRIEND: The great Gloucestershire skipper is back at the county where he enjoyed such success as a brilliant white-ball captain. As he discusses coaching, it's hard not to feel as though English cricket has underused his immense cricketing brain

Half an hour in the company of Mark Alleyne is an education.

Quite simply, it is impossible to believe that English cricket has made the most of one of the sharpest minds on the domestic circuit – not least in the white-ball game, where he was well ahead of his time as an innovator, captain and head coach.

And the more he speaks, the less fathomable it becomes that – in between stints with Gloucestershire, where he is back in a part-time coaching role – he went 14 years without employment at a first-class county.

He is 53 now: a product of the environment he lived and breathed when he was skippering the country’s leading limited-overs outfit under the stewardship of John Bracewell, an ideal mentor who fed Alleyne so much inspiration with the freedom of his ideas and the courage of their implementation: “He has probably made me a more ambitious, adventurous coach. He wasn’t scared to introduce anything that he felt strongly about, and that is what I remember most. I’m quite comfortable introducing things that I think might make a difference to a player or to a team, without any real fear really.”

Alleyne speaks to The Cricketer while keeping an eye on his protégés at Marlborough College, where he is the cricket professional and assistant director of sport, as they put the finishing touches to a convincing victory over the roving side Free Foresters.

“Every coach realises that each player is an individual,” he reflects at one juncture. “You have to have the coaching game that can pander to each individual. Part of the deal is that you get to know every player, where they want to get to and how you’re going to help them do that. That’s the prerequisite, I think. You’re living that small journey with them.

“The better cricketer you are, the more realistic you are about your ability, I think. Some younger cricketers don’t really know how good they are, so they might have aspirations almost beyond what’s reasonably expected, so then you do have to try to manage that a little bit.

“But I’ve been able to be more developmental with the younger age-groups. The coaching requirement at a first-class level is slightly different – you’re really looking for the one-percenters, turning good players into more special players and combatting other good cricketers.

^{Mark Alleyne photographed as a player alongside his raft of one-day titles}

“Although it’s the same game at school level, it’s a slightly different requirement. Both have their own stimulus: I get just as much enjoyment out of improving a young school cricketer from the third team to the first team as I can with a first-class cricketer. I have learned to really love coaching.”

The strength of that passion is astonishing, considering it wasn’t his calling initially. An iconic playing career was winding down towards its natural end when a deal fell through for Graham Ford to join Gloucestershire as a replacement for Bracewell, with Alleyne asked to fill the void. At first, he combined the role with the twilight years of his on-field exploits, continuing as captain in both white-ball formats, before hanging up his boots in 2005. 

Few have pulled off that combination – of player, captain and head coach simultaneously – and Alleyne accepts that it was hardly sustainable, but none could claim to know Nevil Road any better than the club’s most decorated skipper – a winner of nine trophies, and both Gloucestershire’s leading run-scorer and wicket-taker in List A cricket.

“There was a lot of talk about how this is not meant to happen,” he recalls. “People seem to think that you should leave the club before you come back, but I didn’t really subscribe to all that stuff.

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“It wasn’t straightforward but, that said, I was a successful captain and that wasn’t straightforward either. None of it is straightforward. It’s all really challenging: you have a lot of hungry, young professionals who are all really ambitious and want to do well for the team and for themselves.”

To a degree, it was a form of work experience: he was midway through a Masters degree in business, envisaging a second career in cricket management – either with a county, the ECB or abroad. “When the coaching opportunity came along, my professor at Bath suggested that I accept it because there would be a lot of strategic management within the role,” he laughs. “He saw that as hands-on experience that you couldn’t really get within a Masters programme.”

In the end, he spent three years in the job, before moving on to become head coach of the MCC in order “to scrub up on all the facets of coaching” – via a stint at Loughborough’s National Performance Centre. “The role of a coach is a leadership position, so there is a big crossover from captaincy in my view,” he explains. “I didn’t have a lot of experience in terms of developing players technically, but I felt as though I had brilliant experience developing players strategically.”

^{Alleyne celebrates after winning the C&G Trophy}

Perhaps that was never better displayed than in 2007, Alleyne’s final season in charge, when Gloucestershire reached T20 Finals Day for the first time – a feat it would take them 13 years to replicate.

Working at the county once more alongside Ian Harvey and Mark Thorburn, he remains one of the most successful limited-over cricketers seen by the domestic game in the United Kingdom: part of a team that became serial winners, including five titles in 1999 and 2000.

Fourteen years on from Gloucestershire’s T20 final defeat against Kent, he still holds vivid memories and a tinge of regret: “I do remember strongly that Ian Fisher, who was our left-arm spinner and was a big part of our success, didn’t bowl in that game. I do think that we maybe missed a little bit of a trick there.”

He recalls, too, the image of former fast bowler Carl Greenidge – headband-clad – running in to bowl off a shortened run-up, part of a plan that speaks to his thirst for tactical innovation.

“I think it started when we were playing against Worcestershire and they had Graeme Hick,” he says. “We knew how he liked to get himself ready and get his rhythms going. We thought that during the over, we wouldn’t give him any batting rhythm. We’d run from different spaces, making sure there was a different amount of time in between each ball. It was just to disrupt his rhythm and to try to force a mistake, so it was born from that.”

For the time, he was a revolutionary. At the end of that season, the inaugural World T20 was staged, with England fielding a squad of perceived specialists. The Indian Premier League was still a year from its inception and, by the admission of several senior players on the circuit, the format wasn’t yet a top priority for some counties. But Alleyne got it. “Yes, Twenty20 is a fast game,” he explains of his overriding philosophy, “but there aren’t many balls you can wrong, which means the players have to be quite highly skilled to compete on a regular basis. It is pretty unforgiving.”

He led a fine team that was used to winning: Jon Lewis, Alex Gidman and Chris Taylor were wily, intelligent one-day cricketers, with New Zealanders Hamish Marshall and Craig Spearman both terrific, underrated top-order batsmen. And crucially, from a mindset perspective, Alleyne felt the format put his club on a level playing field: “It was always a serious thing for us. It was a game of competitive cricket. Because we always had a small squad, it was the kind of game we could really compete in.”

^{Alleyne is back at Gloucestershire in a part-time coaching capacity, balancing his work alongside teaching at Marlborough College}

He adds: “Over the course of a season, a four-day County Championship was really tough for us with a small group, just because of the time and effort needed to compete every time. It wasn’t that they weren’t all good cricketers, but you just needed some really good depth.”

By then, Harvey had moved onto Derbyshire, but his influence endured. Gloucestershire’s bowling attack maintained a similar collective skillset, with a range of variations carried over from the Glorious Glosters era at the turn of the millennium. Alleyne’s part in that did not go unnoticed when he took the reins as coach. “What helps is that the players around you know that you’ve had success,” he acknowledges. "They tend to trust you a little bit more easily, which makes your own job a darn sight easier.

“A coach needs to really love the game and to want to be part of what’s happening. That has always been in me: watching the game and looking for small areas where you can take advantage in that particular game or in the next game is something I really love doing.

“I can sit and watch people trying to apply what they’ve been practising in the nets for ages, and I get real enjoyment out of people really trying to apply their skills in a game, trying to translate that into a performance without focusing necessarily too much on the result of the game. There are plenty of facets within the game that I can sit and enjoy and watch without stressing over a win-loss situation.”

Since returning to Gloucestershire at the beginning of this season, those skills have taken on extra significance. Following Richard Dawson’s departure to the ECB, Harvey called him with the offer – “a no-brainer,” says Alleyne, whose main role has come in “team sessions and one-to-one in the nets, just getting the players ready for match-play”.

He recognises the differences in the modern T20 game from the format he first played professionally in 2003, the first year of the Twenty20 Cup. It is hardly a hot take that batsmen have learnt to score all around the ground and in all manner of ways, but Alleyne is keen to make an important distinction. “We’re not just talking about top batters now,” he points out. “We’re talking about the standard range of most batters that can hit you everywhere. It is a slightly different game in that respect.”

^{Alleyne had a brief international career around his domestic success}

So, having advanced English white-ball cricket two decades ago, what about now: in an era of data and research, does Alleyne believe he can move the game forward once again?

“I think I can make a difference,” he says, softly spoken but in his element. “However, everyone has access to a lot of analysis now, so I think the key these days is the counter-intelligence really. Everyone has become very good at assessing and collecting the intelligence. So, I think now to get the one-upmanship is about how you’re going to counter the intelligence that they have collected.”

How do you do that? “There isn’t one thing you can do, but what I can say is that it’s not necessarily about winning a five-over chunk of the game. Just winning one ball can make a difference – or taking a top batter’s strike rate from 160 to 120. He might still have a good game, but just by taking his strike rate down a bit by a small percentage could be the difference.

“You have to try to find those gains somewhere. It is hard to be really precise about how that might look, but it can be fairly obvious once you’ve got your opposition and conditions in front of you how you might take advantage of that.”

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And yet, despite this expertise, Alleyne only returned to the professional game earlier this year. He remains the most recent black man – and only the third in history after Derief Taylor and John Shepherd – to have held the head coaching role at a men’s first-class county: “That’s a stat I don’t think any of us are proud of,” he adds. He is doing what he can to help address those numbers, working with the ECB to “get black coaches qualified and give themselves half a chance”. Although he is not involved with the ACE Programme established by Surrey, he has spoken to Ebony Rainford-Brent, the organisation’s founder.

“I think the more important stat was getting more black people into coaching, full stop,” he explains. “You need to create an environment where these guys will go and get their badges, knowing full well that they might get an opportunity to coach.

“Once I decided to commit to coaching, I committed to make myself the best coach I could be by going down to the MCC. The frustrating bit was then a lack of opportunity in those in-between years. It can go one of two ways: you can either lose the stimulation to keep going or you can focus on the area where I am at Marlborough College, where I can impact it and make a difference. It really scratched my itch and I’ve really enjoyed it.

“Getting back to Gloucestershire has been a bit of a bonus and it came out of the blue, but I had to take it. I was straight in there – no hesitation.”

^{A mural has been painted in Alleyne's honour at Gloucestershire's Nevil Road home (photo credit: Nick Friend)}

For the moment, this is a short-term arrangement, with Alleyne’s time restricted until the end of term, before opening up for the remainder of the summer. What of the future, though? The possibility of a longer-lasting return would mark a new chapter in a lovely story.

“I would like that,” he admits, “but I think there are quite a few hoops to jump through before that’s a reality. I’m not aware of what the club are thinking at the moment, but it would be nice to sit down at some stage at the end of the summer and see where we can take it.”

By the entrance to the Bristol County Ground, Alleyne’s contribution to the county has been eternalised in the form of a mural bearing his face among a selection of other Gloucestershire icons. Self-effacing by nature, Covid-19 zone regulations have done him a favour by preventing him from walking past it too often. “It’s a bit embarrassing looking up at yourself,” he chuckles. “But it was a nice tribute to my contribution to the club; I have enjoyed it.”

Not that he is willing to settle for being lionised as a player. He insists it would render him “quite uncomfortable” were Gloucestershire’s squad – many of whom grew up locally as supporters – to feel in awe of his feats as captain, head coach and club legend.

“I’m committed to Gloucestershire, and I want to see those guys do well individually and as a club,” he reflects. “But I want them to see me not necessarily for what I’ve done previously, but for what I can offer to drive their games forward.

“I certainly don’t want to be hanging my hat on the past. I loved it as a player, but I’m in a slightly different phase now and I want to make as big an impact as a coach. That’s my driver.”